Abstract

In this presentation I examine the claims made for the inclusion of indigenous knowledge into New Zealand universities. My focus is on the fundamental contradiction at the core of indigenous knowledge. The creation of disciplinary knowledge with its own concepts, content, procedures, and institutions requires that knowledge be independent from the social location within which it emerged. This means separating the ‘knower’ from the knowledge. But indigenous knowledge, as I will show in a number of examples, is subject to criteria that maintains the link between the knowledge ‘producer’ and the ‘product’. Along with analysing that criteria I ask: What are its consequences of including into the university a type of knowledge that is neither universal, public, nor objective?